[djmips]

What's the advantage over an emulator? This is after all, a form of an emulator - one where you translate ahead. This sort of thing has been done in the past with things like Bleem so it can be more performant but on a modern PC any good emulator is going to perform well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem!

[skrrtww]

The goals of this project and the goals of N64 emulation are fairly different.

The goal of N64 emulators (generally) is to accurately recreate the behavior of the original console.

Conversely, there is a large crowd of people who just want to play SM64, OOT and MM with a bevy of "graphical enhancements" like 60fps, widescreen, texture packs, randomizers, etc.

For these people, the fact that these games originally ran on the N64 is practically irrelevant. In fact, it's a hindrance; The N64's graphical pipeline is cumbersome to emulate and actively stands in the way of modern 'enhancements.'

This project is more aimed at giving the games themselves modern treatments, removing the N64-centric aspects of the games from the equation entirely.

[hot_gril]

Honestly SM64 with new graphics in those demo videos looks worse than the original game. But Gamecube games running in an emulator look amazing because they use a lot more vector graphics, which the emu can scale up and apply antialiasing to.

What interests me more about recompilation is it can produce very efficient binaries instead of having to emulate everything. And also makes it easier to add new features.

[ClassyJacket]

Yeah, SM64 is weird because a lot of '3d' objects used billboarding, it was actually just a flat object always facing the camera, so they don't scale up well. Anything spherical (chain chomp for example).

Hilarious proof: https://imgur.com/gallery/Xw4tN#FoRAGl7

The characters in Mario Kart 64 were like that too, they just prerendered a heap of different angles and inserted the appropriate one.

With recompilation we could change those things, but I'm not sure how much work it would be and how many people who care to play those games would want to alter them that much.

Early 3d games will always have those rough edges sadly.

[hot_gril]

Also a lot of bitmaps on textures and stuff. It's fine though, it's a classic 3D game, no need to renovate it.

[wmf]

JIT emulation can cause stutters while AOT should not. The difference may not be noticeable now that computers are so much faster than the N64.

[doublepg23]

The video shows multiple bugs disappearing when using this method vs. emulation.

[ThrowawayTestr]

Recompilation is not emulation.

[anthk]

I don´t get the downvotes, this is just... porting.